No Shame Peice #1

THE LAND OF GOODBYES
by Stephen Ptacek

(all throughout this monologue, people walk out of the theatre quietly saying goodbye to the speaker)

The land of goodbyes is a farway place, resting far in the distant horizon. However, If you walk toward it, you'll be surprised at how quickly you'll find yourself in the cool autumn climate of it's capital city, latersberg. It's people are a lusty folk, eager to say goodbye as quickly as they meet you. Of course, they know very little of what it means to really say goodbye, because they see each other every day. Really, to the impatient citizens of the land of goodbyes, saying goodbye is more like saying hello. The land of goodbyes is full of buildings with doors instead of windows. In order to let any sunlight into any of their high-rise apartment complexes, one must open a door from the inside (thus accounding for the land of goodbye's high rate of accidental suicide.) The streets are paved with old cobblestones, placed on top old hatchets buried beneath used condoms. All the roads are one way streets in in latersburg, but luckily the city is one big circle, so no one ever leaves. The native dish of the land of goodbyes is a rare delicacy. Cold cuts and cottage cheese served atop blueberry snack toast. The meal is called "hastapronoto", and before eating it the citizens of the land of goodbyes all join in saying "adios." to their meals, as a way of apologizing to the food for having to eat it. Funerals are never celebrated in the land of goodbyes, because the people figure that they've spent their entire lives bidding adieu to the departed. The favorite music of the peole of latersberg are the tunes of buddy holly and jeff buckley, as sung by michael tabor with his mouth full. There is no postal service in latersburg, because no one ever writes home. No phones, because they never call, but there is a vast email network for the more contemplative folks to write big mass emails to all their friends in the real world to keep them abreast of what life is like when you're always saying goodbye. Children are never educated in the land of goodbyes, in fact, there are no children native to the land. All the citizens of the land of goodbyes are imigrants, who, like you, were once visitors who decided to stay there forever.
If you ever visit the land of goodbyes, don't stay too long. It's a nice place to visit, but you'd never want to live there.
You'd never want to live there because it doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist because we'll never let it.
We'll never let it because we'll never really say... goodbye.